OF THE ROMAN EMPIRE
475
liberality of the emperor or the empress. The life of a citizen was less exposed than his fortune to the abuse of paternal power. Yet his life might be adverse to the interest or passions of an unworthy father; the same crimes that flowed from the corruption, were more sensibly felt by the humanity, of the Augustan age; and the cruel Erixo, who whipt his son till he expired, was saved by the emperor from the just fury of the multitude.[1] The Roman father, from the licence of servile dominion, was reduced to the gravity and moderation of a judge. The presence and opinion of Augustus confirmed the sentence of exile pronounced against an intentional parricide by the domestic tribunal of Arius. Hadrian transported to an island the jealous parent who, like a robber, had seized the opportunity of hunting, to assassinate a youth, the incestuous lover of his stepmother.[2] A private jurisprudence is repugnant to the spirit of monarchy; the parent was again reduced from a judge to an accuser; and the magistrates were enjoined by Severus Alexander to hear his complaints and execute his sentence. He could no longer take the life of a son without incurring the guilt and punishment of murder; and the pains of parricide, from which he had been excepted by the Pompeian law, were finally inflicted by the justice of Constantine.[3] The same protection was due to every period of existence; and reason must applaud the humanity of Paulus for imputing the crime of murder to the father who strangles or starves or abandons his new-born infant, or exposes him in a public place to find the mercy which he himself had denied. But the exposition of children was the prevailing and stubborn vice of antiquity: it was sometimes prescribed, often permitted, almost always practised with impunity, by the nations who never entertained the Roman ideas of paternal power; and the dramatic poets, who appeal to the human heart, represent with indifference a popular custom which was palliated by the
- ↑ The examples of Erixo and Arius are related by Seneca (de Clementiâ, i. 14, 15), the former with horror, the latter with applause.
- ↑ Quod latronis magis quam patris jure eum interfecit, nam patria potestas in pietate debet non in atrocitate consistere (Marcian, Institut. l. xiv. in Pandect. l. xlviii. tit. ix. leg. 5).
- ↑ The Pompeian and Cornelian laws de sicariis and parricidis are repeated, or rather abridged, with the last supplements of Alexander Severus, Constantine, and Valentinian, in the Pandects (l. xlviii. tit. viii. ix.), and Code (l. ix. tit. xvi. xvii.). See likewise the Theodosian Code (l. ix. tit. xiv. xv.), with Godefroy's Commentary (tom. iii. p. 84-113), who pours a flood of ancient and modern learning over these penal laws.
